A cluster is a group of independent computers working together that give an illusion of a single system image. Clusters are often used to ensure that mission critical applications and resources are highly available. To provide an efficient cluster solution many vendors offer operating systems (OS) that are “cluster aware.” Most, if not all, cluster communications in these solutions are point-to-multipoint. Events, such as the death or hang of a critical process, on one node of the cluster are conveyed quickly and directly to all other nodes in the cluster. State and health information on one node is also shared between all nodes of the cluster. These activities naturally lead to a multicast architecture for cluster network communication. Consequently, many existing cluster products employ multicast approaches. Typically in such an architecture a centralized repository disk is used to define the cluster configuration data. The centralized repository disk needs to be accessible on all the nodes in the cluster. In one approach, a solution is provided that uses the multicast architecture, however this solution does not scale to include nodes located at different sites that are separated by geographical boundaries. First, this approach does not scale due to communication links spanning large distances. For multicast communication to work, each link from end to end must supports multicast forwarding, supports the desired multicast group, and supports the desired port. If any one of these conditions is not satisfied, the multicast communication will be broken, which occurs due to the fact that telecommunication companies typically do not support multicast forwarding over such distances. Second, this approach does not scale due to the nature of multicast. More particularly, multicast, where one-to-many communication is used, requires the use of the user datagram protocol (UDP). However, because the UDP does not have built-in reliability, inter-site communication is compromised.